The great thing about the Catholic church, is that the Pope doesnt stick around for very long. The Cardinals elect someone that is going to either get fired or promoted (depends how you see it) by virtue of his age.
Would this make the banks more responsible? If you elected a chairman/CEO of advanced years, would they not be more interested in building a lasting legacy, rather than trying to grab a quick buck for the future?
If I only had 5 years left, I'd be less inclined to plunder the coffers and fix interest rates :>
This is pretty interesting, but I think you are assuming too much. I don't think the pool of qualified candidates to run global institutions is big enough to exclude everyone that's under 85, 80, etc.... Also, it may be difficult to find people who are qualified and meet your age requirement that actually want to run a global institution. I think there are many young, responsible CEOs in place right now who are doing right by their company. It's not easy to run these places.
Besides media charicatures, how much do you know about the Church? Some popes are around for decades, and they do a hell of a lot of damage before they kick the bucket. AND they're deemed 'infallible' by dogma which means that Catholics aren't allowed to question what they proclaim as the 'word of god'. It's a terrible, regressive system, and doesn't even represent what the church was originally about. I was raised Catholic and while I still show up to church to say hi to family and friends, I can certainly tell you that their management style is archaic and dysfunctional.
The older the pope, the more set in their ways, unreasonable, and regressive the pope tends to be. Look at the dope in office now! PJ2 started to make progress, but instead of keeping that going, the church tempered any sense of sanity they started to gain by electing a WWII holdover to ensure they remain firmly rooted in the past. The Cardinals in Rome and the Holy See spend far more time vying for personal power and nursing pet theological abstractions than they do tending to those who trust them, and they shroud this in a veil of 'official secrecy'.
The Church is also extremely fragmented, and the diversity of views is more representative of a country than a corporation: just like being an American, MANY catholics disagree openly with what the leader is saying or doing. The big difference is that there's no mechanism to challenge them. The Holy See has created a monopoly of power that can't be challenged no matter how irrelevant they make themselves to real life, and a company with such management would not only be god aweful to work for, it wouldn't survive very long. Forget visionary leadership into the future, the best that can be hoped for from the Church is common sense, but much more often we see sheer asinine stupidity. So, membership is dwindling. Eventually, people get sick of arguing with them and just leave. The religion is in a crisis that they caused, and it's too late for them to fix it...and they frankly don't want to. The management of the church are incapable of admitting that they make mistakes and stupidly refuse to acknowledge the modern world.
The Church is also about as unfriendly to a democratic republic as it gets. Running a company is such a manner would cause a revolt. The literal meaning of 'Catholic' means 'all encompassing', as in, the religion will change and grow to accomomodate everyone: this has not been the case for many centuries. Instead, they demand total obedience to an obsolete set of ethics. Rules are made in secret by old men who are totally out of touch with real life. Many recent rulings on such basic, common sense things as safe sex policy in Africa make things WORSE. It's inexcuseable and I'm the first one to let the pastor in my town know. And he does nothing. So, I and many others are simply drifting away over time. Maybe when no one is left they'll get their heads out of their asses, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm one of the voices in the church who is in open rebellion of their betrayal of their original mission, and they are NOT a good management style. Like many ancient religions, there is much of value that could and should come from them, but it's being drowned out by all of the really really bad real world decisions they're making. There are perks to being Catholic...access to an observer post at the UN, or institutionally sanctioned forgiveness of guilt (and debt, ahem)...but overall it's a dying institution in drastic need of an overhaul. Just go to a church and you'll see that most people there are old: this was not the case years ago, and the Church did this to itself and it annoys me to no end that they have the wealth and power to make serious contributions but do not even approach the level of impact they easily could. And lately, even their worldly stockpile of wealth is being diluted in the face of the civil penalties for child abuse: yet another glaringly obvious result of piss poor management.
I can not express to you enough my annoyance with the church's management and their perversion of a beautiful tradition. A simple man, two thousand years ago spoke a mission of peaceful kindness and a happy afterlife for those who made an effort to live a decent and just life. Then his message was hijacked by a dying Roman Empire and it's been all downhill from there.
Religious leaders are like monarchies or dictatorships: you may get lucky and get a really fantastic leader. Much more often you have some fool that just runs their own agenda of wacky ideas and makes life unbearable for people. And sometimes, you get a crazy person.
Welcome to the Protestant Reformation.
Protestants = blasphemers and heathens
Burn in hell
Id vel sint non. Ratione et veniam omnis eius.
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